Disclaimer, I have not had the time to play on the PTR yet and cannot comment on the new factions and the cypher system.
As a casual player, grinding reputation is one of the few activities I really sink my teeth into, and I quite enjoy filling up that bar to reach exalted. Despite the many flaws of the reputation systems the past few expansions, I still quite enjoy doing most of them. I have some thoughts, critiques and suggestions for how to improve them in the future, and I hope to encourage some discussion about the topic as well.
- Paragon Reputation
I love the idea of paragon reputation, but I’m not a huge fan of the implementation. This ensures that reputation gains never really go to waste, and gives you a continuous stream of rewards despite already having completed the initial grind - and that’s great!.. but I’m not a huge fan of making the reward a box with a random chance of containing a pet, or a toy, or a mount. This means that the reputation grind hasn’t ended once you reached exalted, in fact, it might just have begun. There are many horror stories of players who have been grinding paragon boxes from Legion to get the mounts, and I have personally also been burned by the paragon grind a few times (the Larion Cub was quite elusive). I think WoWhead reported that the drop rates of these rewards were greatly increased in 9.1.5, and that’s great, but it is a band-aid solution to a bigger problem. The solution is, quite simply, to not put rare rewards in them in the first place, and instead put something else in there. It already rewards a lot of gold - which is a great reward to get from this - and I believe the covenant paragon boxes contain currencies relevant to their zone, if you are part of their covenant at least. There will usually always be other reasons to do the content that rewards reputation, such as doing rares, treasures or daily quests with other rewards. If you have already reached exalted, then the reputation gains from those activities are wasted without paragon boxes - and that feels a little bad.
TL;DR: The reputation grind should end at exalted, but keep paragon reputation as a bonus.
- Reputation Gains and Gameplay
There have been few innovations in reputation gains in WoW over the course of the year, but my favourite innovation so far has to be the Archivist’s Codex in Korthia - especially after the 9.1.5 quality of life changes. Don’t get me wrong, the Codex had some issues, but those weren’t strictly related to the reputation grind itself in my opinion. Collecting artifact fragments and finding cool treasures that come with their own lore, and then delivering all that in to the keeper, feels very immersive. It makes you feel like an archaeologist (why was archaeology removed again?), and you can approach it in so many different ways. The most effective way is obviously to do all the Korthia content, and in 9.1.5 to farm the big mobs in the shadow realm, but you could also stick to doing the daily quests and weekly quests, and not be too far behind everyone else in the grind. The grind was also pretty fair, perhaps with the exception of reaching rank 6 - that final stage took forever to earn, but seeing as some of those rewards were gated behind renown as well… Plus, considering that the currency you earn is both the currency that you purchase rewards with and the currency that increases your standing with the Codex, all it really took to balance the grind was to make the purchasable rewards at each stage at least somewhat equivalent in cost to actually earning rank 6 - and I think it was perfectly balanced in that. All in all, I love the Archivist’s Codex for that. I’ll talk more about the problems with it in another section.
The other factions of Shadowlands… I don’t love them that much. With the exception of two, they are all more or less copy/pasted versions of one another - The Ascended, Court of Harvesters, Wild Hunt, Undying Army, and to a lesser extent, Death’s Advance. You earn reputation from them by doing world quests/daily quests, weekly quests, other quests in those zones, and the (somewhat) randomised callings - with the bulk of the reputation coming from the callings and weekly quests. This system is… okay. I actually think it’s fine, but I’m not a big fan of the reputation gain weighting.
A world quest will net you 75 reputation with a faction, but a calling will give you 1500. There are only a handful of world quests available each day, let’s use a hypothethical average of 8 quests per day, which would net you 600 reputation if you do all of them on that day. If a calling is also up that day, you will net a total of 2100 that day. Over the course of a week you can expect at least two callings, so that would be roughly 6000 reputation every week if you do all the world quests and both callings. That’s a pretty fair number, in my opinion. So what then is the issue?.. you only get 75 for each world quest. This amount feels insignificant. Daily quests used to give you 250 reputation back in the day, that’s more than 3 times as much, and you usually had just as many of them to do. Daily quests didn’t come with callings, so naturally they had to grant you more reputation in order to keep the rate at a similar level, but it felt much more impactful to earn more reputation that way. Doing a world quest for reputation feels like earning a penny when you’re saving up for a car, while doing a calling feels like getting your pay check. I don’t have an immediate solution to this; perhaps doubling the reputation gains from world quests and reducing the gains from callings to compensate; reducing the amount of world quests available but make them more lucrative; add other sources of gaining reputation that aren’t any of the above.
TL;DR: Reputation gain rates are good, but the weighting of reputation gain sources does not.
The last factions are, of course, Ve’nari and the Avowed. I used to like the Ve’nari faction quite a lot, pre-9.1, and I might be in the minority for that. Again, I think Ve’nari had some issues, but I don’t think that’s about the reputation itself. Theoretically, you could earn a lot of Ve’nari reputation in 9.0 by doing all the rares - but aha! The Eye of the Jailer was a diegetic way of limiting how much you could earn, and it forced you to have to play smart. Do you optimise your gainings by only killing select enemies? Do you do the daily quests? Do you kill the rares you want specific drops from, or need for your meta achievements? I think this system was great, and it is a shame that it didn’t work out in the end. More on that later. In 9.1 and forward, Ve’nari reputation is kind of boring. Now the effective way of doing it is to literally do all the Maw content and kill all the Korthia rares. You no longer have to choose how to approach it. But you might now say: wait, didn’t you just praise Korthia for doing this exact thing? And yes, I did, but Korthia didn’t have the Eye of the Jailer watching over it to begin with. This completely changes how the Ve’nari faction works, it was built with the Eye of the Jailer in mind, and it feels a little lesser for not having it. Anyway - this section is about reputation gains: I think the rates at which you earned Ve’nari reputation were actually fine, even if you only got 75 reputation for killing regular ‘rares’, because Ve’nari doesn’t follow the same template as the other factions, going from friendly-honored-revered-exalted. I actually don’t have that much to say about the reputation gain rate - I just think it’s fairly solid.
So… the Avowed. The only faction in Shadowlands I actually don’t like. I do actually like the concept of it; farming sinstone fragments, hunting inquisitors and rescuing souls… but man, it is such a repetetive slog. First off: you have to farm sinstone fragments by killing enemies, which will each grant you a bit of reputation up until you reach honored. Then, you have to turn those into a sinstone, and then go kill that inquisitor. They drop grand inquisitor sinstones that you can use to get even bigger inquisitors. So far, so good… but it takes a long time to farm each sinstone at a certain point, and each of the inquisitors give you 50 reputation - or 100 for the stronger ones. And then you have to kill 10 of them to get to the big one, which gives you 250 reputation. You could alternatively find lost souls for 50 reputation, plus a little extra from the sins you extract from them - which is actually the most efficient way of doing things now that flying is enabled. There are no daily quests here, no weekly quests, it is a bona fide grind - and it is a really slow grind. Compare it with the dreaded Warlords of Draenor faction grinds, where each enemy gives you 5-10 reputation, or 50 for the rares. The reputation gain rate is abysmal, and the content isn’t all that fun. Almost all of the inquisitors have the same moveset and aren’t really a challenge. The grand inquisitors are fun, though. Collecting souls is okay, seeing as they’re usually hidden away and you have to fight through enemies in order to deliver them (unless you have flying and just don’t), but it is ultimately just a fetch and deliver quest. I think the Avowed would have been so much better if the regular enemies continued to give you reputation, or if you simply gained more reputation from killing the rares. The best way to earn Avowed reputation is to play in a group, because each extra character in the group increases the rate of rares you can kill by 100% because of how personal loot functions - but you’re still doing the same kind of gameplay over and over again. It’s just not great.
Oh, and I haven’t forgotten about the Court of Night or the Ember Court, I just don’t really consider them to be factions as much as these others - the former is part of the Night Fae’s anima conductor and the latter is a Venthyr minigame - so I consider those part of the covenants rather than factions as a whole.
- Rewards
This is where reputation in Shadowlands gets controversial. With the exception of the Avowed, I’ve been pretty positive about the factions in Shadowlands, even if I have acknowledged most of them have issues. The issues stem from the rewards that are locked behind these reputation grinds… and the gameplay these rewards conditions you into. Everyone is on the same page right now, right? I’m talking about Ve’nari and the Archivist’s Codex, and the gating of the conduit and gem slot generators. And partially also the legendary memories, but honestly, those were available at revered and that doesn’t take much of a grind to get to. When important endgame progression systems are locked behind a system, everyone who plays endgame content seriously is funneled into doing that content regardless of whether or not they enjoy doing that content - and by the nature of progression and social pressure, they are conditioned to play through these grinds as quickly and as efficiently as possible. That’s a bad thing. You should want to farm the repution because you want to do it, not because you have to do it. This has ruined so many players’ experience of this content, even if I think a lot of this content is good, actually! Of course it isn’t fun to do Korthia if the only reason you’re doing it is to raid or do m+ more efficiently. It should be completely optional for players to grind Ve’nari, or the Archivist’s Codex. The solution is actually simple; don’t add important progression to these systems, let them reward cool new cosmetics, alternate routes for casual players to gear their characters (to a certain extent, so that raiders/pvpers/m+ers don’t feel forced to do that), quality of life changes to doing the world content itself - heck, even story quests, let’s get more of those locked behind reputation, I loved the Ve’nari quests.
The actual rewards in Shadowlands factions are kind of underwhelming, but I also think this might be because a lot of the rewards in Shadowlands come from the covenants. There are some cool pets and mounts, but that’s more or less it. The Avowed has Venthyr cosmetics locked behind it, the Court of Night is (technically available to everyone) a Night Fae feature and has Night Fae rewards… it’s mostly slim pickings all around, but that has been a trend over the past couple of expansions. I think adding more rewards like these would be a better incentive to do this content rather than adding another way to earn conduits or whatever else we’re going to get in the future, but I also kind of wonder if what we have now is enough. Perhaps in the future, when we won’t have covenants anymore, a lot of the covenant-style gameplay and rewards can be inserted into factions to help giving them better identities and more varied gameplay.
- I probably forgot to add some things…
I’m sure there are perspectives that I haven’t considered when it comes to reputation - these are my thoughts on my personal experiences with the reputation system, and how I have engaged with it. I might have said some things that others disagree with, too, and I’d be delighted to hear their side of the story too. I might have some more ideas pop into my head after I post this, and I will be sure to add those as well!
… And sorry for the wall of text :>
